“I’m very scared, I’m in here by myself but my kids are outside,” H’kli
shouts at the top of her voice in her orange prison uniform. “It doesn’t matter
where we go, we just cannot go back to Vietnam.”

Standing next to her is Nay Y Khot, 25. Despite sharing a squalid cell with
around 130 other detained immigrants, he is also far more concerned about the
prospect of being forced back to Vietnam.

“If I get sent back I’ll go back to jail and be tortured,” he explains.

H’kli and Y Khot are two of 85 Montagnards jailed in August after being
arrested during raids in Nonthaburi province. A list of the adult detainees
shows they range in age, from 18-year-olds to some who are in their 70s. A
further 47 Montagnard children are being held at the Thai Ministry of Social
Development and Human Security, according to Fortify Rights.

It’s just the latest in a seemingly never-ending cycle of hardship for
Vietnam’s forgotten Christians.

The Montagnards, or Dega, are the indigenous people of the Vietnamese
Central Highlands.

They faced persecution for decades for supporting America in the Vietnam war
and for practising forms of Christianity that Hanoi brands “evil way”
religions.

There have been widespread accusations of human rights abuses and land grabs
against them in their homeland, and thousands have escaped to Cambodia and
Thailand in recent decades in hope of a better life.

Most of the hundreds who fled in the most recent wave that started in late
2014 have been deported back to Vietnam by the Cambodian government or returned
“voluntarily”. The rest are mostly either living in what amounts to little more
than house arrest in Phnom Penh, locked up in Bangkok’s IDC or in limbo on the
outskirts of Bangkok.

Sitting in a small house in a far-flung district of the capital, around a
dozen Montagnards recount some of the horrors that led to them fleeing their
ancestral home.

Sin Thut, 31, recounts how one day he went to check on his sister. He was
concerned for her well-being as her husband had left her and she had once been
raped by a local policeman.

“The door was closed but I heard noises so I opened it and saw the same policeman trying to rape her,” Thut
says. “I was going to jump on him and hit him but then he hit me and I fell to
the floor. Before he left he put a gun to my head and said if I told anyone
he’d kill my whole family.”

Nay Them, 33, the husband of H’kli in the IDC, says he was arrested twice
and beaten by Vietnamese police due to travelling with a well-known Montagnard
pastor named A Dao, who was sentenced to five years last year for “organising
for individuals to flee abroad illegally”.

Both Them and H’kli are HIV positive. Although he concedes he cannot prove
it for certain, Them believes he was infected during an unnecessary blood
transfusion administered at a military hospital after somebody ran him off the
road in 2013. He believes the whole event was a set up and that he can see no
other way he could have caught the infection as he and his wife had only ever
slept with each other.

Them claims police quickly began spreading gossip. “The police knew I had
HIV and started spreading rumours saying I claim to be a Christian but have
HIV. Soon the whole village knew,” he says.

Others recount similar stories of torture, intimidation and efforts to wipe
out their way of life, including schools banning children from speaking in
their native Jarai tongue. Why China’s Hui Muslims fear they’re next to face
crackdown on religion

When Montagnards are deported back to Vietnam, a common tactic employed by
Hanoi is to force confessions from them denouncing the UN on television and
warning others not to follow in their footsteps.

Due to the Communist Party of Vietnam’s surveillance of the Central
Highlands and its refusal to allow journalists or rights workers access to the
area, verifying the accounts of Montagnard refugees is tough.

But the party itself does little to dispel the accusations. In 2015, a
report by Human Rights Watch titled “Persecuting Evil Way Religion: Abuses
against Montagnards in Vietnam” was made up of predominantly state-released
media articles. One boasted that local officials had organised “many waves of
search and hunt” actions against unofficial religious activities among
minorities to “deal seriously with their leaders and core members”.

The Vietnamese government did not respond to requests for comment.

While the Montagnards are less likely to be returned to Vietnam in Thailand
than Cambodia, they are still in a precarious situation. While many have been
recognised as refugees by the UN’s refugee agency, with no legal documents,
they are unable to access employment or education and are forced to live off
charitable handouts or work illegally, which puts them at risk of abuse and
arrest.

The Thai government does not recognise refugees and this opens the door to
rights abuses and indefinite detention of people who should be given
protection, said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia
division.

“The separation of Vietnam Montagnard children from their parents runs
completely contrary to Thailand’s obligations under the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child, and so their parents should be released from the IDC and
allowed to reunite with their children,” Robertson said.

In a recent op-ed in the Bangkok Post , Kasit Piromya, a former Thai foreign
minister, slammed the government’s approach. “We need to stop thinking about
refugees as a national security issue, but rather see the humanitarian
dimension. Those who have fled for their lives need our care, not to be
retraumatised through arrests,” he wrote.

A Thai immigration official hung up when asked about the plans for the
Montagnards in the IDC.

Grace Bui, a volunteer for the Montagnards Assistance Project, who delivers
food to those in prison and on the outskirts of Bangkok, said the chances of
finding a country to take them in were “very low”. Refugees from war-torn
countries were always going to be first in line, meaning the jailed Montagnards
could be locked up for years, she said. Related articles This is something Sin
Thut is very aware of. “It’s not up to me. I’ll go wherever any government will
take us. I know Vietnam is low down the pecking order but if I go back it will
be serious,” he says. “It is for all Montagnard Christians, there are many
worse off than me.”